'You are a cad, aren't you ?' she said.
Her eyes, seen in the mirror, held the same baffling expression that had puzzled him in the car; but now there was mockery with it. Her lips were stirred by a little smile of almost devilish satisfaction. She had a pleased air of feeling that she had done something very clever.
'I think you're a dangerous woman,' he said with profound conviction.
She yawned delicately and rubbed her eyes like a sleepy kitten.
'I don't know what you mean,' she said. 'Anyway, I'm too tired to argue. But you'll have to go on being nice to me now, won't you ? I mean, what would Patricia do if I told her?'
'She'd write your name on the wall,' said the Saint, 'where we keep all the others. We're making a mural of them.'
'Would she? Well, don't forget that I know what you've done with Bravache and those other men. When they've been bumped off, or whatever you call it, I shan't want you to get hanged for it if I go on liking you.'
The Saint was grinning as he went out and locked the door. It was the first piece of unalloyed fun that had enriched the day.
At 4 A.M. that morning a young policeman on his beat noticed a suspicious cluster of shapes in a doorway in Grosvenor Square. He flashed his light on them and saw that they were the bodies of three men, with adhesive tape over their mouths and their hands fastened somehow behind them, sprawled against the door in grotesque attitudes. They were stripped to the waist and horrid red stains were smeared across their torsos.
Blood! . . . The young policeman's heart skipped a beat. In a confused vision he saw himself gaining fame and promotion for unravelling a sensational murder mystery, becoming in rapid succession an inspector, a superintendent, and a chief commissioner.
He ran up the steps, and as he did so he became aware of a pungent odour that seemed oddly familiar. Then one of the bodies moved painfully and he saw that they were not dead. Their bulging eyes blinked at his light and strange nasal grunts came from them. And as he bent over them he discovered the reason for the red stains that had taken his breath away, and at the same time located the source of that hauntingly familiar perfume. It was paint. From brow to waist they were painted in zebra stripes of gaudy red and blue, with equal strips of their own white skins showing in between to complete the pattern. The decorative scheme had even been carried over the tops of their heads, which had been shaved for the purpose to the smoothness of billiard balls.
Hanging over them, on the door handle, was a card inscribed with hand-printed letters:
THESE ANIMALS ARE
THE PROPERTY OF
MR KANE LUKER
———————
PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH
4
Simon Templar was having breakfast in Cornwall House when a call on the telephone from the watchful Sam Outrell at his post in the lobby heralded the arrival of Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal a few seconds before the doorbell sounded under his pudgy finger.
Simon went to the door himself. The visitation was no surprise to him—as a
